FORTITUDE Sky Looking at the cover of the DVD set made me think of Whiteout, a fun mystery set in Antarctica based on a graphic novel by Greg Rucka. Going in I was expecting a story set in a cold climate with a lot of outdoors stuff and while those are aspects of the story that is far from all of it. Fortitude is a small town on an island in the arctic circle. It’s supposed to be one of the safest places on earth. A character describes this in a way that makes sense. Paraphrasing: “People who come here need to be able to put a roof over their head and provide for themselves. So people here are happy and we have no crime.” The town really is...

THE TUNNEL The Complete First Season PBS I’ve reached the point where any thing on PBS that has a mystery is going to be on my list of things to watch. Life threw me a couple hiccups so it took a little longer to get to this than I would have liked, but I sat down and did the whole thing in one marathon viewing. WOW. We open on a crime scene in the tunnel connecting France and England, a body is found perfectly centered on the border. The French have the case and a Brit copper shows up after they received a courtesy call. Things change from a little uncomfortable to weird when the body is being moved and falls in to two perfectly even...

SCREAM QUEENS First Season Fox Brad Falchuk and Ryan Murphy from American Horror Story got together with Ian Brennan of Glee and created this wonderfully camp (on purpose) and fun show. I am a fan of American Horror Story and was delighted to see some of the actresses from that show here. The plot is pretty simple, a sorority on a small college campus has had some problems over the years, all coming from the fact that the sisters of Kappa Kappa Tau are all horrible people who care about none and as a result over the years people have died and at the very least had miserable experiences with the sisters. The new school year has the new...

Bring Me the Head of the Machine Gun Woman I love looking through bargain and clearance sections for books and DVDS. On a recent hunt I found a copy of “Bring Me the Head of the Machine Gun Woman” (original title was Tráiganme la cabeza de la mujer metralleta). Made in 2012 in Chile and was directed by Ernesto Díaz Espinoza. With a title like that I HAD to buy it, I just couldn’t leave it there. Two dollars well spent. The hero of the movie is a DJ named Santiago (Matías Oviedo) and will in the bathroom he hears a conversation a local bad guy is having with his underlings. He wants a bounty hunter dead. The bounty hunter in question...

The Get Down Season 1 Sony Pictures Television Netflix The Get Down is a mess. It’s a fuzzy mish-mash of genres, chock full of things that make little to no sense. It attempts to lump together elements of superhero movies, musicals, kung-fu flicks, spaghetti westerns, 70’s Blaxploitation films, and god only knows what all else. It’s a fiction, but features exaggerated versions of real people…who are still alive, as are many that were active in the setting. This is expectedly problematic. In general, it’s a bit of a fucking disaster. But, if you can get your head out of your damn backpack, let go of concerns for things like ‘sense’ or...

Film fans had best start saving up now for next month’s Criterion Collection Line-up, which includes films from Robert Altman, the Coen Brothers, del Toro and Richard Linklater. I am not going to list the entire roster here, but these are few that have me twitching. BLOOD SIMPLE by Ethan and Joel Coen Joel and Ethan Coen’s career-long darkly comic road trip through misfit America began with this razor-sharp, hard-boiled neonoir set somewhere in Texas, where a sleazy bar owner releases a torrent of violence with one murderous thought. Actor M. Emmet Walsh looms over the proceedings as a slippery private eye with a yellow suit, a cowboy...